Steve and Judy's Travels!

  Hawaii never had mosquitoes until larvae arrived in the bilge of whaling ships in the early 1800s.  If you’ve ever been to the wetter parts of any island there you’ve seen what a problem they are now.  Feral cats are an even bigger problem to native species.  They don’t seem to have any natural predators and have spread to every island with devastating effect on birds and other small critters.  The endangered status and even extinction of multiple native bird species are directly attributable to feral cat predation.  Feral cats even endanger the resident monk seals with a single-celled organism spread through their scat.   Here on the mainland we have kudzu vine smothering southern forests.  European starlings dominating habitat.  Ditto house sparrows.  Burmese pythons with huge appetites and no natural predators in the Everglades.  Tamarisk trees along the Colorado River out-compete native vegetation and dominate the banks.   Rabbits were introduced to Australia for food.  Now they’ve taken over the continent.   The list goes on.  Invasive species are a problem everywhere.  They endanger the natural order of things.  What is the *most* invasive species on the planet?  There are so many to choose from, but my vote would go to Homo Sapiens.    

  A midnight start.  We patrol the marshes and get a few birds that we can’t get during the day; primarily owls and rails.  It’s almost leisurely birding and we got our usual amount, about 15 species, including clapper rail and king rail.  The big rush of birds doesn’t start until about an hour before dawn when the forest scrub birds start waking up and stretching their vocal chords.  From there on, the rest of the day, it’s birding at full-speed.  In the hour before dawn, we picked up another 30 birds, including common pauraque and common poorwill.  By an hour after daylight, we were up to 81 birds, including Audubon’s oriole, yellow-billed cuckoo, and a bald eagle.  It was fast and furious after that when we got into the migrants.    The success of our Big Day effort always comes down to how we do at the coast; whether we get a good migrant count or not.  This time we got the best-ever migrant day (for a Big Day).  As we walked around Blucher and Rose Hill, we were pushing a bow-wake of birds.  This was not a fallout where the birds are knocked down exhausted by inclement weather.  This was just a really good day in a normal migration with a thousand active birds refueling before continuing their trek north.  Wood thrush Swainson’s thrush, black and white warbler, blue-headed vireo, prothonotary warbler, chestnut-sided warbler, hooded warbler, waterthrushes everywhere, worm-eating warbler, kentucky warbler.  Too many ovenbirds to count; maybe a hundred.  Chuck-will’s widow, cerulean warbler, blue-winged warbler.  A wonderful rush of birds.  Now we’re at 192 species and we have to keep moving.   On to the Botanical Gardens.  Eared grebe, marsh wren, dickcissel.  American avocet, long-billed curlew, and Hudsonian godwit!  Phalarope, more sandpipers and gull-billed tern.  205.  Moving on.  Whimbrel and red-breasted merganser.  207.  Black skimmer and osprey.  209.  On to Packery Channel.  Marbled godwit and a bird that has absolutely no business being there, Altamira oriole.  211.   On the drive down Highway 361 on Mustang Island, Aplomado Falcon.  Two of them.  Philadelphia Vireo, eastern kingbird and least flycatcher at The Willows.  215.  Belted Kingfisher.  Savannah sparrow.  Herring gull and black tern at Jetty Beach.  219.  We passed last year’s record.  Another warbler, another swallow, and solitary sandpiper at Paradise Pond.  222.  Now it’s 7:15 but we’re still finding birds.  Sunset isn’t until 8pm.  There aren’t many birds left to get.  Magnolia warbler at the Birding Center.  A late green-winged teal, a wilson’s snipe, and the last swallow to get, the bank swallow.  226 species and dark.  There aren’t any more marsh birds we need in the dark.  We’re done.   We missed a few birds; there is no way to get them all.  We didn’t get a crow or a Mississippi kite in Victoria.  We never got a Virginia Rail.  But this day was so good, we did so well on so many birds, I can’t imagine ever doing better.   Our route looked like this:   2018 Big Day map   Our stats look like this:   Commute in the bus the day before   and after to get to   the start and end point:                             350 miles Time slept the night before:                       2 hours Meet up at Midnight Driving for the Big Day:                                590 miles Number of stops for food and fuel:            1, in the middle of the night Birding sites visited:                                     21 Walking to get to birds:                               5 miles Time spent birding:                                       20 consecutive hours Number of species recorded:                      226 species, a new Big Day record for us! Year-birds for me:                                        Jon predicted 50.  I got 54. Time slept the night after:                          12 consecutive hours.   A very excellent adventure!  

  But I never stop forgetting either.    

  It was great.  We were awesome.  I’m a little tired.   More to follow tomorrow.    

  It’s that time of year again.  The time when the leisurely pursuit of bird-watching turns into a competitive sport.  The Big Day!  How many species can we record in 24 hours?  We start tonight at midnight.   This hasn’t been an intense year of birding.  Judy and I are only at 277 species for the year.  We haven’t birded up here at Corpus Christi at all.  It’ll be interesting to see how many species we have after I bird with Jon for an entire day tomorrow.